Bottled, bottled water everywhere…

Admit it. You drink bottled water from time to time. You’ve mostly stopped buying flats of it from Costco or Trader Joe’s. But once in a while you’re on a road trip, and you didn’t bring along your Sigg bottle or some other receptacle you use to feel a bit less guilty about the bijillions of plastic water bottles you’ve consumed from and tossed into the recycling bin. And you’re filling up your car (a hybrid, of course!), and you are hot and thirsty and nothing else — coffee, Slurpee, apple juice — will slake your thirst. And there it is in the refrigerator case: cool and clear and gleaming.

Chronicle file photo

Ok, enough set-up. People — policy makers, environmentalists, consumers — are getting more and more concerned about the ill effects of bottled water. There are the obvious ones: the energy, materials and waste associated with the bottles themselves. But there also is growing concern about the amount of water being poured into those containers (some estimates put it in the billions of gallons).

Enter AB 2275, introduced by Southern California assemblyman Felipe Fuentes. The bill would require water bottlers or private water sources to provide detailed information about the source of the water, whether it’s a public or private agency, an artesian well, lake, river, spring, etc. It would also require the company or source to detail the total volume of water bottled or sold for either wholesale or retail use.

In a state facing a severe water shortage and the prospect of another dry winter, this would seem to make sense.

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch recently put it like this: “California is facing a serious water crisis and in order to promote efficient water management we need to know how our water is currently being allocated.”

Drought. Lots of people who need water. Companies pumping water for sale in bottles. Maybe there should be some accounting for bottled water volume, no? Not so fast. First, bottled water isn’t the only murky area when it comes to volume data. California doesn’t exactly know how much water it has — in part because there’s no real inventory of the state’s groundwater, or the stuff that sits in big aquifers underground.

Second, some say that businesses shouldn’t necessarily be forced to reveal info about their operations.

The Department of Public Health, which currently requires bottled water companies to prepare an annual bottled water report, says that bottled water volume is “considered confidential business information, as it can act as an indicator of a company’s financial health, and, thus, exempted from release as a private record,” according to a letter sent to Fuentes by Monica Wagoner, deputy director of legislative and public affairs at the state department of public health.